Howdy y’all. This is Ben at Dancing Rabbit, reeling from one of my least favorite seasonal events: the temporal manipulation known as “Daylight Savings Time Ends.” I seem about as able to convince my daughter that she gets an extra hour of sleep as I am trying to tell the goat she doesn’t need to be milked for another hour. Here at Dancing Rabbit, my day is shaped around natural phenomenon, like the hours of light in a day, though the village as a whole maintains many customs which rely on the time as described in hours and minutes. For example, we all generally eat dinner at 6:30 pm. This has been inconvenient as the hour of dinner and hour of dusk have drawn near in these short, cool days. The ducks and chickens are far too active in the daylight to easily pen up. The result: at least one person (usually Mae) in our sub-community, is absent at the start of dinner, off on animal chores. It is early November. Hunting season is upon us. Some mornings I hear the faint pop of rifles. While the oak leaves still cling stubbornly to the trees, the walnuts, honey locusts, and cherries are completely nude of foliage. The draws and old fencelines that were awash in autumn hues of crimson and gold one week ago are beginning to visually open up as leaves shower and drop in the wind, nourishing the micro-critters, and hence the soils, beneath. Osage trees bomb our new home with hedge apples, the green, brain-like fruits errantly shattering our soup bowls and threatening injury to our bodies. I occasionally will send Althea to gather all the hedge apples on our warren and stash them in a 55 gallon drum for later use. It is our intention to save all this seed for the planting of a living fence, or hedgerow, around our pasture and tree plantings. Osage is a thorny and flexible tree when young that can be trained and woven into an effective barrier for many types of livestock. When cut open, the hedge apple is quite sticky. Some folks use it as a spider repellent. I suppose those folks don’t have as many flies as I do. The hedge apples will sit in the barrel for the winter, where the snow and rain will hopefully erode them down into a seed slurry which can be spread in a shallow trench and sprouted in spring.
Hedgeballs are not the only tree fruit we Critters have collected for germination this fall. We are currently gathering and planting hazelnuts and acorns from the land in our rodent proof nursery box. Basically, it’s a dresser drawer we liberated from the dumpster with hardware cloth nailed to it, filled with nuts and dirt and left outside. This is the safest way to plant crunchy bits of protein in the winter without voles and field mice devouring our quarry. Come springtime we shall transplant the germinated hazel and oak babies out to our poultry ranch for erosion control and fodder for all the animals, including myself. Not only do we maintain a barrel of hedge apples, but I did a little bucket inventory up at our place, and can fully report that we have a lot of interesting things in ours. For the sake of decency, and not to mention good public relations, I will not attempt to describe the full contents of said buckets, but only heartily recommend to the beginning homesteader that the value of labeling your buckets not be overlooked. Let’s just say that I’m richer in chicken feathers than I knew.
Fall is a time of both death and abundance. Barren trees twist in the wind, their roots nourished and blanketed by mounds of leaf mulch. Frost killed vines of quasi-feral squash dangle from the garden compost, bearing orange treasures. Hickory and walnut fruits litter the paths beneath solemn, slumbering trunks of trees. The flower stalks of sunchokes appear gray and shrunken, but the soil beneath is nearly pulsating with tubers awaiting freezing nights to sweeten. We Critters have taken refuge from the cold nights in our half-finished, completely sufficient home: the Foxhole. I’d like to think it is modest, housing three adults, a child and a sixty pound dog in a 400 square foot space. It certainly is dusty at this stage of plastering, and already there is a very large field dressed buck hanging off of our rafters outside, in front of our kitchen window. From inside the warmth of the house we are hosting some children for a little homeschool biology lesson as I write.
This deer was shot by a nine year old (I read it on the tag) and dropped off at Dancing Rabbit yesterday afternoon. I had no intention on going hunting, and the young hunter apparently had no intention on eating venison, so it was a win-win I think. In fact, there are many Share the Harvest type programs across the country, including NEMO, where one party gets to employ its very practical wildlife management and land skills, while another gets wild game, usually paying only for processing. We figured we’d just do the processing ourselves, having previous experience with deer and regular experience with things smaller. Meanwhile, the kids get a peek at animal anatomy. After skinning it and saving the hide for tanning, we will quarter it, dry age the hindquarters in our half finished root cellar for a few days, and pressure can the rest of our share for the future. Kassandra and Toon will be helping us along the way for their share of meat. I think there is an ecological advantage in consuming meat this way. This bountiful animal which we are about to share and thrive off in the coming months existed perfectly on its own, without human directed inputs of energy, feed, and water, creating no real waste in its life, which is not the case of livestock raising. The ecological cost of deer hunting is much smaller than domestic meat production. Deer population in the Midwest would remain stable if 25% of does where hunted every year. Much of the land conserved in the Midwest is saved for hunting, and therefore wildlife corridors are being widened. To me it just makes sense to eat the animal that I don’t go broke feeding.
So keeping with the theme of this week’s newsletter this past Friday was Dia de los Muertos, which meant an abundant post Halloween potluck, serving in part honoring those who have passed. I ate some four year old kraut that was pretty good. This gave way to the annual Progressive Fiasco, a sort of roving trick-or-treat party which takes many shapes and forms in different locations. I should also mention that at Dancing Rabbit, we have a board. It is composed of folks here, and folks in other places. They also came together here this weekend. I can’t really tie that into my theme this week, but it was nice to have them around to drink beer with.
I really need to wrap this up. Summarily this week I learned to plant acorns before the deer eat them all, put all my feathers in one bucket, and to not be surprised when a large carcass is left on my doorstep.
Dancing Rabbit is an intentional community and educational non-profit in Rutledge, Missouri, focused on sustainable living. We offer a tour on the second and fourth Saturdays of the month, April through October. The tour starts at 1:00 PM and generally lasts one and a half to two hours. You do not need to make a reservation for regularly scheduled Saturday tours. For directions, call the Dancing Rabbit office at 660-883-5511 or email us at dancingrabbit@ic.org.